Peter Sloterdijk

Light and Illumination

Notes on the Metaphysics, Mysticism, and Politics of Light

"Omnia quae sunt lumina sunt."

–– John Duns Scotus

Metaphysics as Metaoptics

The human being, the contemplative animal, can call upon the world to account for his existence in light and sound, because he is on the front lines of a cosmic development, which, according to its dominant natural trait, can be interpreted as an audiovisual "eye"-opener to the state of being. The complex of knowledge that is processed within the species Homo sapiens incarnates the result of a biological, cognitive evolution of adventurous improbability. This is intensified in the production of living things whose relationship to the environment is created by a cerebrally guided, complex integration of eye, ear, hand, and language. The special position of the human being in the cosmos is hence a fact that no longer draws only the attention of theologians, but even more from biologists, who bow before the riddle of the human being's sensory receptiveness to the world. The cognitive primacy of the human genus among the ensemble of natural species seems to have something to do with the sensory primacy of the audiovisual in humans, in a way that we do not yet completely understand.

Harvard ecologist Edward O. Wilson illustrated these ideas with the following imaginary scenario. We find ourselves in the heart of the Brazilian rain forest in the middle of a dark night: "The forest at night is an experience in sensory deprivation most of the time, black and silent as the midnight zone of a cave. Life is out there in expected abundance. The jungle teems, but in a manner mostly beyond the reach of the human senses. Ninety-nine percent of the animals find their way by chemical trails laid over the surface, puffs of odor released into the air or water, and scents diffused out of little hidden glands and into the air downwind. Animals are masters of this chemical channel, where we are idiots. But we are geniuses of the audiovisual channel, equaled in this modality only by a few odd groups (whales, monkeys, birds). So we wait for the dawn, while they wait for the fall of darkness; and because sight and sound are the evolutionary prerequisites of intelligence, we alone have come to reflect on such matters as Amazon nights and sensory modalities."1

Continuing with these observations, it can be said that human intelligence, especially in its contemplative and scientific formations, signifies a rich endowment of audiovisual faculties. The ability to depict the world at all in terms of human knowledge is based in the special provisions of the power of sight—the auditory components of our perceptions of the world will be abstracted from the following—which opened up when human beings left the path of pure biological evolution. It is not without reason that a great majority of Western philosophers made optical analogies in order to express the nature of insight and describe the foundations of our recognizability of the world. Together, world, intellect, and insight were supposed to form a context similar to the one shaped by illuminated objects, eye, and light in the physical sphere. Yes, even the "foundation of the world" itself, God, or another central creative intelligence, was often presented as an active, intelligible sun whose rays produced the forms of the world, things, and intellects, much like an all-encompassing, self-observing theater of absolute intelligence, as it were, to whom seeing and creating would be one and the same. Hence, there is a good foundation for the assertion that, in this regard, occidental metaphysics—due to its continual fascination with optical motifs—is a kind of metaoptics. Postmetaphysical philosophers would then have to attempt to overcome optical idealism and restore to the condition humaine the actual range of its receptivity to the world.

Glades of Light

In "light" of a post-metaphysical interpretation of human sensitivity to the world, it can be seen that people are advent animals: creatures about to arrive. This is simultaneously a classic concept and one that has not yet been thought out completely, whose previous formulations up to the present day no longer satisfy the requirements of contemporary thought. In Judeo-Christian tradition the basic motion of human beings as they "come into the world" is comprehended in the concept of creation, which interprets "coming into being" as the mark of an ancient, divine creation. The result of this was that the human process of "coming into being" took second place to the ancient, passive process of "being placed into the world." In fact, the medieval Christian world was more interested in hierarchy and perpetual life than in the experience and advent of the new. The post-Christian modern era, on the other hand, strengthened the active, innovative aspects of the human relationship to the world. It shifted the emphasis from the creation of human being to his own powers of creation. From a modern perspective, therefore, coming into the world primarily means using one's own authority to make a world into which "the human being" intends to come: a kind of world in which the dream of a dignified life can be universally realized. Both kinds of anthropology—the Christian interpretation of the human being as the creature and vassal of God, and the modern concept of the human being as the engineer of the world and the creator of himself—are marked by shortsighted views of fundamental human motility. Humankind's adventure of advent has not yet been adequately defined.

As a creature still coming into being, the human being is by nature an animal who comes from inside. Here, "inside" means: a fetality, non-manifestation or latency, security, water, familiarity, the desire for safety, and domesticity. "Coming into the world" therefore must be understood in five ways: in the gynecological sense as birth; ontologically, as receptivity to the world; anthropologically, as the transformation of elements—from liquid into solid; psychologically, as the process of becoming an adult; and, politically, as the process of taking over areas of power. Wherever people are found, we as a genus do not simply frolic in the light of the sun, as all of the others do. Instead, that is where the glade of light can also be found, and its existence is what makes it possible for its inhabitants to say that "there is a world." And so advent and glade of light cleave together. Light shining over everything, which is the case, is not one of many other preconditions. Rather, it is the advent of the human being, an approach to the world, which makes the dawning of the world possible. The arrival of the human being is itself the "eye"-opener to existence, in which being is illuminated. From this point of view, the advent of the genus as a whole—including its epistemological, technological tip—can be understood as a luciferous, cosmic adventure. In this case, the history of humanity would be the era of the glade of light; the era of humanity is the era of lightning that forms the world, which we do not perceive as such, because we who are in the world are inside the lightning.

Light as the Guarantee of the Ability to Know Being

People nevertheless derive their certainty that they are sufficiently familiar with their location from their experience of the world as a place whose visibility is stable—and as living beings who are active by day, they tend to explain their sense of existence as "existing during the day." Therefore, even for the earliest Western metaphysicians and philosophers of nature, everything about the world that existed during the daylight hours—one might even be somewhat justified in saying that occidental philosophy is in its very nature heliology, meaning sun metaphysics or photology—became part of the metaphysics of light. The fact that the Egyptians made some attempts at monotheism, considered a monarchy of the sun god, corresponds to this rationalized, metaphysical understanding of light. In terms of religious history, the Egyptians can be traced forward into the Roman Empire, to the cult of sol invictus and Mithraism. Philosophically, they can be traced as far as the medieval Christian metamorphoses of Platonism. In the famous image of the sun from the sixth volume of his Politeia, which preceded the Allegory of the Cave, Plato provided the basic motif for all later metaphysics of light. Here, he explains that besides the eyes and a visible item, a third thing is needed in order to see successfully: light. Light is the gift of Helios, the god of the heavens, who, as lord of light, not only gives human beings their sense of sight but also makes things visible. By its very nature, the sense of sight is the sun in its other state—the rays and energy of the sun—and therefore the reason why the sun-like eye is receptive to the sun. Basically, to see means to continue to convey the rays of the sun through other means: sun-like eyes beam at visible things and "recognize" them by virtue of these beams. Now, for its part, thinking itself is just another way of seeing—namely, seeing in the territory of invisible things, ideas. Just as Helios provides light to visible things, agathon, goodness, functions in the world of ideas as the central sun that reigns over everything; it is from this that people derive their power to think, while at the same time, ideas are given the ability to be thought. Using clear rays of thought to think real ideas is, analogously, the same thing as looking at well-lit, visible things using (heliomorphic) rays of vision. And just as the latter is not possible at night, when one can only perceive silhouettes and dark nothings, thought also fails if it is directed toward things mixed together with the darkness of pure opinion. Right (agathomorphic) thought is seeing by the light of eternal day the world of ideas as it is illuminated by goodness. One can see here how optical idealism prepared for its decisive coup by subordinating sensory vision to visual thought. According to Plato, Helios is the image of goodness, which flows out of the sphere of ideas into the world of the senses. From the analogy of sun and the divine (goodness) comes an ontological hierarchy with the principle of the intelligible god at the top. Thus modern intellectual metaphysics surpassed archaic natural philosophy in rank—visible light, too, became "just a likeness," although still a majestic, virulent one in terms of natural theology. There is a reason why medieval metaphysics interpreted the fiat lux of Genesis in the Platonic sense—for light and the creations of the sun plausibly represent the first deeds of the god who, in articulating his creations, could do nothing but represent in materiality what most resembled his nature: goodness. In an as-yet-to-be-created world of greatest good, the most noble must be created first—as if, among the creatures, light were analogous to the spirit and the divine, a sublime natural body and medium, which can be seen by the human eye redeemed by Christianity as the evangelium corporale. The necessary conclusion of positive theology, that what was best about God manifested in optimal creation, results in three basic determinants of the creation: it has to be round, because the sphere represents the morphological optimum; it has to be flooded with light, because light is the physical optimum; it has to be perfectly transparent in logic, because transparency means the cognitive optimum. All three optima coincide together in one creation, which is imagined as a sphere of light emanating from the absolute point of light, God—that sphaera lucis, which along with the model of the world provides the foundation for its ability to be recognized. Understanding the world means imagining the categories emanating from the one unconditional source of light, being, and comprehensibility.2 Admittedly, one of the chronic, awkward situations in light metaphysics—in both Plato and Christian theologies—is dependent upon the matter of the origin and rank of the material above which light, as the first of God's productions, was supposed to shine. In a similar way, the Christian interpretation of Genesis in the Old Testament has to deal with the issue of what kind of water the spirit of God originally floated above.

When light gained an absolute position in monotheistic metaphysics, an aspect of the light that shines above all that exists came to fruition—all the way to the annihilation of matter exposed to light. This heralds the Gnostic motif of light's unworldliness as well as the eschatological idea that at the end of all time, the world and life will dissolve into a final, inwardly divine light symphony. Then light alone will be all that exists, or rather, everything that is saved from annihilation will remain in a state of eternal suspension. The most sublime monument to this kind of thinking consists of the cantos in the Paradiso of Dante's Divine Comedy. In them can be found a kind of world beyond of blissful, intelligent beings modeled entirely out of light, all of whom are part of the stream of "participatory" original light that flows back unhindered to itself. Dante's visions respond to the final images in the Revelations of John, which prophesy the end of day and night and the rule of eternal light. In heavenly Jerusalem, all lights, both astral as well as those made by humans, will have become superfluous.

"(21:23) And the city had no need of sun or moon to shine upon it; for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the lamb. (22.5) There shall be no more night, nor will they need the light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will give them light...."

Evidence of the close relationship between monotheism and the metaphysics of light is that medieval Islamic culture also produced a cornucopia of highly esteemed treatises on the philosophy of light— mixtures of Platonic, Plotinian, Aristotelian, Jewish, and Arabic components, with the occasional addition of Iranian dualist motifs.3 Using phrases that are familiar to those who know the Platonic tradition, the Arabian philosopher Abu-Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059–1111) speaks in his tract, The Niche of Lights (Miskat al-anwar, written around 1100), about the meaning of light in the words of the prophets. "Thus, for the eye of reason, the verses of the Qur'an have the same meaning as the sunlight has for the physical [literally: visible] eye, because through it, vision is perfected. Therefore it is appropriate to call both the Qur'an and the sun 'light.' The symbol of the Qur'an is the sunlight, and the symbol of reason is the light of the eye. Thus we can understand the meaning of this verse in the Qur'an: 'Believe in God and his messengers and in the light, which we have sent down (to you).'"4

Blinding

Where there is much light, there is also much shadow; where there is too much light, darkness reigns. It is part of the unique dynamics of metaphysical monisms that when they are taken to extremes, they must end in mysticism. Anyone who relies without reservation on the "one" must ultimately, for good or bad, see all differences removed in the abyss of the "first-last." This is also true when the absolute first is regarded as light, original light, or super-light. If, in some way, this last abyss of light is, in human experience, to dissolve, it will only occur when the person realizing it is destroyed by it: this is the rule of radical monism. Being destroyed in the "one" negates the difference among light, the power of vision, and the illuminated object: the person seeing drowns in the primordial sea of light, which at the same time ceases to be experienced as brightness, insofar as brightness still belongs to the non-abyss zone of the light-dark difference. Thus, under monist premises, light mysticism is the necessary key to the metaphysics of light—their superfluity or excessive function, as it were. Even Plato regarded the ascension of those freed from the cave to the open light of the "one" as a kind of blinding—a catastrophe affecting the power of vision when faced with the fundamental heavenly light. Through Plotin and Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita these concepts moved into medieval theology to form a portion of its culminative mystical figures. At the apex theoriae, the peak of vision, the brightest vision is transformed into blindness, absolute light into darkness, perfect wisdom into unknowing. St. Bonaventura (†1274) thought of the last phase of the itinerarium mentis in deum—the journey of the soul in God—as destructive-transformative, transitus, meaning the transition into darkness (caligo), a process resulting in blissful blinding. In the language of light mysticism, the person meditating and then melding with the absolute is said to be "dying." Thus, classic metaphysics also recognizes the "death of the subject" via excessive illumination. What was known in the Middle Ages as enlightenment is the intermediate stage of divine practice in light mysticism, which is completed in the triad of "catharsis-enlightenment-unity" (Latin: purificatio-illuminatio-unio; Greek: katharsis-photismos-henosi). Thus, German mystics came to such resounding formulations as überliehte dunkle vinsterheit (luminous yet somber darkness) (Heinrich Seuse, Vita), which are less poetically bold than they are logically consistent.

Passion of the Light

Wherever the mysticism of light most closely approaches religious themes, it has less to do with optics or logic than with the way the self comprehends conscious existence. For a long time, the only field in which Westerners could attempt to discuss subjectivity dealt with the theory of light. It is not the light of the physicists that gives people something to think about when considering the matter of God, the world, and the self, but the personal light, which is a metaphor for one's feeling about oneself and bliss. How is it that in the midst of things, whose aggregate is the entire world, there are souls, self-lights and internal sparks, as it were, whose light cannot be understood as if it were an object-state or a natural reaction? The philosophy of light accompanies the history of the riddle which says that the "subjectivity" that discovers itself represents itself. The existence of the human self has always implied the existence of a light or spark, which allows us to ask if it does not originate somewhere else besides the material world. To speak of the experience of an inner light means—mutatis mutandis—to participate in Moses's experience in front of the burning bush, from whence, in the spirit of the flame as it were, a voice said: "I am; that is who I am"—or otherwise translated: "I am who 'I-am-there'" (Exodus 3:14). So it is not surprising when, in high religion, beyond optics and logic, there is a turn to the personalization of light. People are not only basically concerned with the light that shines and the light that makes it possible to see, but even more with the light that lives, the light that cheers and heals. That is why the origins of the metaphysics of light are just as much soteriology as philosophical optics, just as much metaphysical therapy as logic. The tone of this kind of healing light story is given by the prologue of John the Evangelist.

"1:3–4 All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of men.

5 The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it.

8–9 The real light which enlightens every man was even then coming into the world.

10 He was in the world; but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him."

This light, regarded as the "light of life," shares with those who are alive the compulsion to suffer. "Like a mortal," this "lux vivens" (St. Augustine) comes into the world, and after following an exemplary path of suffering to overcome the world and death, returns to its source beyond heaven. For it, the world is the theater in which its passion play takes place. Among the canonized Evangelists, John's ideas are the closest to those of the Gnostics, according to whom the souls of some people—the pneumatics—are fallen sparks of light who are reminded of their true nature by the appearance of someone who calls them, a savior who can liberate them from the prison of the material world. The Gnostic drama concerning the arrival of light in the world culminates in the religion of Manes, who interpreted the course taken by the world as a passion play of suffering light. Each individual light-clad soul is included in three phases of a cosmic drama: in it, the light descends from its original state of detachment into the confusion and suffering, in order to ultimately be saved through a process of purification involving detachment and re-separation.5 These kinds of narrative passion plays about light offer a logical opportunity to answer the otherwise insoluble philosophical question of the source of non-light, the material world, and evil. Since light is, at first, simply an expansion of itself, it needs to be broken by the resistance of the world in order to reflect upon the world and then return to itself from across the distance. From the early Gnostics to Hegel, the passion play of light not of this world as it suffers in non-light is the perquisite needed so that the light that has returned to itself can "finally" be reflected in itself and know.

Enlightenment

As the modern era began, the ideas of light metaphysics fundamentally shifted in the direction of Western rationalism. The real world no longer lay underneath the mysterious eternal light of a divine world beyond. It progressively revealed itself over the course of a process of illumination, known by the epistemological title of "research," whose political program was "enlightenment." The motivation for this lay in a new understanding of the concept of the foundation of the world itself. Instead of an authoritative original creation of the world based on a hierarchy of creation, there appeared the notion that people themselves set up the world as it was. The consequences for the understanding of light were far-reaching. Whereas the old Western ontology—which could barely be differentiated from Eastern metaphysics—saw God, the world, and souls through a giving or revealing light, the new European method of reasoning bet on its own enlightening deeds: hence, the de-ontologization of light (as well as the mind and the deed). Light became the medium and instrument of a praxis that created its own, perfectly adequate explanation. "Enlightenment" is the process that challenges modern reason in order to cast light on social and natural interrelations. One could say that light was activated and turned into a probe that would technologically and politically penetrate the mysteries of the world. The ontological, religious habit of participatory worship of the mystery was transformed into the will to de-mystify and reveal. Modern politics and technology shared the idea of bringing light to what had been dark or shadowy. The Enlightenment was the age of light penetration. Nobody would ever again have the wool pulled over his eyes, in the name of more elevated insight, by a privileged, intellectual priesthood. So shadowy figures were brought before the public, transparency replaced the practice of politics behind closed doors, subconscious motifs were elevated to the light of the conscious mind, new sources of energy provided artificial lighting for houses and cities. A luciferous—"light-bringing"—activism marked the epoch that emerged from the siècle des lumières. Lamplighters and philosophers, engineers and psychologists, journalists and surgeons, detectives and astrophysicists all participated in the great coalition to aggressively illuminate everything, as it understood the industrial, electrical, and electronic modern era. The partisans of the democratic, technocratic campaign of light recognized their natural opponents in the defenders of premodern conditions—the "obscurantists" and sympathizers of the arcane agrarian age with its supernatural lights and privileged enlightenment. The "luciferous" light of emancipated preoccupation with the self, which has, in the modern age, become the foundation of all foundations, cannot tolerate any other source of light—especially a "light from above"—apart from itself.

Artificial Illumination—Postmodern Twilight

Even the light of Enlightenment experiences its shadows. This characterizes modern man's experience of himself, as he sees the world not in a better light, but, as a result of the Enlightenment and progress, in a worse one. The political education processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have consequently brought about a transition from the optimism of enlightenment to a historical pessimism, affecting all areas of civilization. In the attempt to balance two hundred years of "enlightened" politics and technology, most commentators discover the need for a "clarification of the Enlightenment" or a critique of enlightening reason. One of the most persuasive themes of what is commonly called the postmodern is this investigation, after the fact, of the results of the Enlightenment:6 reflection in the twilight of a great experiment. The addition of the Soviet powers and electricity did not led to a red dawn for all of humanity, or to a bright day for the participants in the great attempt at socialism, but rather to the obscuring of life's perspectives for almost everyone involved. Out of the synthesis of free-market capitalism and the welfare state, which characterizes the "way of life" of the "enlightened" Western industrial nations, there has not sprung a state of general satisfaction, but a culture of sullen ambivalence, which seems to have lost sight of grand perspectives and projections. Above the life led by working consumer societies shines the gray light of the posthistorical non-perspective. The epoch no longer articulates its consciousness of light through massive solar symbols, but through the arrangement of discrete artificial sources of light, such as spotlights and floodlights. At the apex of artificial lighting technology, which, upon occasion, is called "new," there is a consciousness of a widespread, general confusion in perspective and an inability to grasp the big picture. Its tag betrays the disappointment of the Enlightenment in the face of the failure to live up to its optical promises. In the inability to understand the world can be seen the crisis of that panoptical rationality which was supposed to have proved the modern Enlightenment to be the pragmatic heir to the old European metaphysics of light. Looking back at the history of optical idealism—in its religious as well as political forms—it can be seen that in the meanwhile, the entire westernized hemisphere of the world has become the land of the setting sun.

Tail Light

Must we now anticipate a return of the religions that worship light as a reaction to the discontent with this twilight state? There are certain indications of this. First of all, current worldwide offensives launched by the monotheistic religions include strong characteristics of a restoration of light metaphysics, together with panoptical views of the big picture and ideological certainties about the world, whose attraction for the easily swayed masses of the three "worlds" should not be underestimated. On top of this, from the speculative activities of modern scientists emerges a multiplicity of ideologically suggestive models of evolution, in which ideas from light metaphysics once again appear in a different shape. This was begun in the middle of the twentieth century, with the ideas of the heterodox Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, who summed up motifs of light metaphysics, cosmology, and Christology in an eschatological vision of Dantean range. According to him, the entire world process is moving toward the total enlightenment of all creatures. Under the auspices of modern hyper-science the ideas of the anti-cosmic Gnostics return home, as it were, to the cosmos. Among other things, this is a mark of the system developed by scientist and psychologist Arthur Young, who, in The Reflexive Universe (1976), depicts the present time as the vertex of a curve in the evolution of light. After the fall of light via the world of atomic particles, the molecular world, the plant and animal kingdoms, and the realm of humanity, this has gotten to the point where there is hope for its re-ascension, with the goal of returning to the light. With this loop or arch model of evolution, Young copies, in a very symptomatic and original way, ancient theories of emanation, according to which the cosmos was created by rays from the "über-one." Asian and medieval European concepts of "enlightenment" as the ultimate goal of the soul return in his scientistic tones, usually with a touch of evolutionary theory. The new light-loop evolutionists might believe it probable that people who have to regard their status quo as the interim result of cosmic development after an initial hyper-light catastrophe (The Big Bang) could via future expansive arches of tension just as well end up in a general enlightenment. People like Ken Wilber have made a name for themselves with revolutionary ideas of enlightenment (for example, Up From Eden, 1981).7 Where speculations of this sort have the effect of forming milieus, as in certain subcultures in California, a new "Light Age" can be proclaimed—with echoes in particular circles of central European neosophists and the philosophies practiced by consultants.

In many ways, old questions of what will be seen last of all are still important to modern humanity. Will the last vision be nothing more than the eternal blink of the last human being looking into a fading evening sun? Does it correspond to the experience of the dying, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says when it speaks of a transition into the white light of extinction? Or will the last vision be blinded by a nuclear hurricane—the technological realization of mystical transition via light, as it were? If it is true that technology will never invent anything that has not previously existed in metaphysics, then humanity, preformed by the metaphysics of light, has a good chance of ultimately seeing a great, self-made light, "brighter than a thousand suns." Or does the nature of the civilization process consist of keeping the last vision of all things open through constant postponements? The difference between the ultimate and the penultimate visions will be void of objects, if the world is open to the eyes of artists. "The eye creates the miracle of opening up the soul to that which is not soul, the blissful world of things and their god, the sun."8

This essay was first published in Gestaltung mit Licht, ed. Willfried Baatz (Ravensburg, 1994), pp. 14–39.